Time Travel in Fandom

We’ve reached episode 88 this week and to pay tribute to Back to the Future we talk about different fandoms that utilize time travel, and the unique ways that they all explain or use Paradoxes. After our discussion about some ways that time travel is used in Fandom we talk about why time travel is used so often in pop culture.

Random Fandom – Super Powereds

Since we haven’t heard from you in a while about the Fandoms that you love we spend some time talking about a book series that Branden stumbled upon called Super Powereds. This is a story about a world where there are three different kinds of people. The first class is the Supers who have super powers that they can control. The Second class of people are the Humans with no powers. Finally, Last and considered least the third class is called Powereds, or people who have a super power but can not control it. This story follows five former powereds through their experience at Lander University’s Hero Certification Program after a company finds a way to turn them into Supers.

While Talking about this story prompts us to answer the inevitable question, “If you could have any super power which one would it be?”

One thought on “Time Travel in Fandom – Episode 88”

Sara here. I enjoyed this episode, and I would like to add that I have also seen Primeval. I really liked it up until about the third season where they shuffled around the cast and then after that they lost me. I only started watching that show because it had the main actor from the Syfy miniseries Alice in 2009. Which by the way is a wonderful alternate reboot of Alice in Wonderland if you have not seen it. I also started watching 11 22 63, then gave it up after one episode. However I did enjoy the book.

On the subject of time travel, I realized the last week that if someone ever went back in time and successfully saved JFK, and if he indeed ended the Vietnam War sooner, or didn’t have it at all, then it is very likely that I personally would not be born. Both of my parents met when they were enlisted in the armed forces in the late 70’s. Without the Vietnam War lasting as long as it did, they would not have been enlisted, would not have met, and I would not be alive today. Therefore if someone did go back in time to save JFK, I would be forced to go back in time in order to stop them so as to ensure my own existence. This means that I would be the villain in a time-travel story! I would be trying to stop the hero from saving the president and therefore trying to ensure that the President Kennedy does actually die. It is amusing to realize that maybe the bad guys have their reasons for what they do. 🙂

I thought the movie Looper was very ambitious, but very flawed. The second half of the movie seem to have almost nothing to do with the first half, to the point that I got annoyed with the entire thing.

re: new Star Trek movies, on tumblr it’s referred to as “star trek: aos” for Alternate Original Series, tho I think if I heard the term “Kelvin universe” I would probably infer what they meant.

One of my favorite examples of time travel is in the old fantasy novels by Anne McCaffrey, called the dragonriders of Pern. In that series humans on another planet ride dragons that not only fly but also can teleport. The main character discovers that the dragons can actually teleport into the past if they have a good mental image of the stars and planets in the sky at that time. This leads to a pretty dramatic event at the end of the novel but I don’t want to spoil it for you. If you like fantasy, I think that series is one of the very best portrayals of dragons in fiction. However it does have some pretty mature content and a fairly dated idea of gender politics, so I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody younger than 16. I read it when I was about 12, because I had unfettered access to the public library.

If you’re interested in some other books to read, the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler is a stunning examination of what happens when a black woman from the 1970s time travels into the slaveholding era of America, and interacts with her ancestor who was a white slave holder. Few novels about time travel focus on women, particularly black women, and this one does not shy away from the culture clash that comes from person in the modern era trapped in the time period where she is in constant danger. I hope they make a movie of this book some day, because I think it is a great time travel adventure, and a compelling story about our history.